Before I tell you about the seasonally attuned courses the chef Hiroki Odo prepares at his new and virtuosic kaiseki restaurant, Odo, I want to tell you about some that he does not prepare. At two points during the March menu, a person who is not Mr. Odo faces you across the thick plank of Lebanon cedar that forms the dining counter and makes something for you.
The first time is about halfway through the meal, when Seong Cheol Byun shows up, shapes half a dozen pieces of sushi and lays them down, one by one, in front of you. Some of his ingredients, kept on wooden trays that he carries from place to place, are typical, like the warm short-grain rice and the dark nishiki that he will brush over certain fish. Others are less typical. The ginger he mounds on your plate is pickled together with sliced lotus root and daikon. On March 1, looking forward to spring, he added cherry leaves to the mix.
Mr. Byun, a Korean-American, ferments daikon, cabbage and sesame seeds to make white kimchi, which he wraps inside nori for a tuna roll. You eat it like an ice cream cone, but faster. When Mr. Byun worked at Sushi Nakazawa, much of the seafood he used was flown in from Japan. At Odo, almost all the fish have been caught off the East Coast of North America: Long Island black sea bass, Florida mackerel and North Carolina bluefin tuna, which may be several weeks old before Mr. Byun is ready to serve it.
This sushi reflects the American region where it is made, incorporates the Korean background of the chef making it and still has an unmistakably Japanese spirit. This one course, if tripled in length, could be spun off into a separate establishment that would probably be among the top two dozen sushi restaurants in the city.
The second time an Odo course is prepared while you watch, it is made in a cocktail shaker and served in a cocktail glass. It is, as you may have guessed, a cocktail, though it is also the first of two desserts, sweetish and not especially boozy. Frank Cisneros, the sommelier, subordinates the alcohol to fresh fruit, in the style of the revered Tokyo bar Gen Yamamoto. Barrel-aged soju is muddled with one or two sprightly segments of mikan orange, subjected to a calisthenic shake and strained into a delicately etched glass before a shimmer of sparkling wine is laid down on top. Orange juice in cocktails usually tastes diluted and weak; in this drink, it was radiant.
I would say that the drinkable dessert course could be expanded into a separate cocktail bar, except that Odo already has one of those. Odo, which opened in December a few minutes’ walk from the Flatiron Building, is entered through a door hidden in the back of a compact den — cafe by day and bar by night — called Hall. This arrangement seems to remind people of a speakeasy, although it would take an especially clueless bootlegger to open a speakeasy inside a bar.
The broth of Odo’s shio ramen is made from fish bones and seasoned mainly with salt.CreditAn Rong Xu for The New York Times
So far, Hall has not been fully discovered, but it still gets busy enough at dinner time that you can be stranded by the front door for a few minutes before anyone on staff notices. Some diners on their way to Odo will find this an awkward start to a meal that costs $200 before tax, tip and drinks.
But they may also discern that Hall, lined with carved oak panels salvaged from what appears to have been a library or church vestry from around 1900, is one of the neighborhood’s most entrancing rooms; that the corridor, which seems too narrow and definitely climbs on its way toward a too-short brass door with no handle, is perspective-altering in a way a Surrealist would enjoy; and that Odo, a shadowy and windowless space on the far side of that door is an unusually tranquil shelter from crowds, noise and anything else you might want to get away from for a couple of hours.
The 14 counter seats face the kitchen and, in the middle of it, a charcoal-gray island. This is where Mr. Odo and his cooks assemble the other courses I promised to tell you about.
Duck breast has been grilled over charcoal and positioned between two sauces. One is a black spill of concentrated soy spiced with sansho pepper; the other is an ivory pool of puréed apples and cream. These sauces contrast in every way you can think of, including East versus West, and they come together like opposing poles of a magnet.
A springy chunk of truffle-flavored mochi is crisped on the grill and engulfed in a white-miso soup that has grated white truffles floating on the surface. You smell truffles in the air first, get them on the tip of your tongue next and finally taste them everywhere when they’re released from the mochi.
A croquette tastes something like an Italian rice ball made from New England clam chowder that has young bamboo shoots in it. This golden, breaded arancino is finished with dots of grated goat cheese.
Shaved lamb shoulder, baby harukei turnip and two asparagus stalks as thin as licorice whip are served, still cooking, in a hot broth, a kaiseki version of shabu shabu.
Odo — incidentally, the name is pronounced as a set of initials, O.D.O. — pursues local ingredients not just for its sushi course but throughout its menu. The simmered lamb used to gambol in the Hudson Valley, the croquetted topneck clams were raked in off Long Island and so on.
Kaiseki’s near-liturgical focus on timeliness almost seems to demand local ingredients, and they have been central to Niki Nakayama’s strategy at n/naka in Los Angeles, but less so for New York’s few kaiseki chefs. Chikara Sono at Kyo Ya, for instance, takes pains to import traditional ingredients from Japan the minute they’re available.
Mr. Odo came to New York as the chef of Kajitsu, the extraordinary restaurant on East 39th Street that follows the vegetarian cooking tradition known as shojin ryori, born centuries ago in Zen Buddhist temples. One contribution he made in his five years there was to freshen up the menus with more food grown nearby.
In the first and last tastes of his February and March menus, he anchors Odo firmly in the New York region. When you sit down, you are immediately poured a cup of cold sake. It is brewed in Brooklyn from koshihikari rice grown in New Jersey, and it is very good, swirling with fresh-fruit aromatics. Then at the end, after the fresh fruit, Mr. Odo serves ice cream made with kasu, the creamy solids left over at the end of sake distillation. The ice cream looks like vanilla and tastes, not surprisingly, like fermented rice. This particular kasu is supplied by the same brewery in Brooklyn that makes the sake.
Expanding his range to meat and fish at Odo, he has kept the resourcefulness that limitations encourage. Somewhere along the way Mr. Odo also picked up technical skills in traditions far outside kaiseki.
Each night, in the gohan course, Odo offers a choice of three starchy dishes. This is where I encountered a very fine seafood curry over rice; an elegant bowl of short ramen noodles in king crab broth; and fresh soba served with little pieces of pickled vegetables and wasabi blossoms, looking a bit like broccoli florets but tasting like mustard.
As with the cocktail and the sushi, each of these dishes could, if Mr. Odo wanted, be leveraged into separate specialized restaurants, or food-hall stands. You could tell yourself that $200 is a large amount of money for a single meal or you could say that for the chance to visit all these different establishments without leaving your seat, it’s a pretty good deal. Either way, you’d be right.
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